When people think about articles of clothing that have left a permanent mark on fashion, most likely imagine a piece of couture from a classic French or Italian designer. Some might picture streetwear giants like Supreme or Comme de Garcon. Some might even make compelling cases for a company like Bonobos, which primed the world for direct-to-consumer (D2C) clothing companies with their easy-wearing chinos, or Indochino, the first mainstream online made-to-measure suit company.
Few people think Cordarounds â corduroy pants with the ribs going horizontally instead of vertically. And yet these humble beginnings mark the growth of one of the hottest fashion brands in Silicon Valley. Since these humble beginnings in 2005, Cordarounds has grown into Betabrand, which has grown into an âif you know, you know; and if you donât, you will soonâ favorite. In 2013, the brand broke out of the Valley with the launch of their most iconic piece â Dress Pant Yoga Pants â but the inevitability of their success was cemented long before then.Â
It would be an understatement to say that âcrowdsourcingâ was in its infancy in 2005. Sure, the idea of using an army of volunteers to help create something wasnât new â the Oxford English Dictionary was famously crowd-sourced by a team of 800 volunteers in 1884 â but the term âcrowdsourcingâ as we understand it today wasnât actually coined until 2006. Crowdfunding was even further away â Kickstarter didnât launch until 2009.
So it was that in 2005, Chris Lindland found himself with a crazy idea, some bad jokes about horizontal stripes, and no ready-made platform on which to share his discovery with the world. Instead, he began talking with his friends about his plan to make horizontal corduroy pants. His friends had suggestions on how to make them better, and (perhaps surprisingly) the desire to purchase a pair.
Cordarounds was born out of that back-and-forth between Lindland and his friends, who (perhaps even more surprisingly) helped front the money for Lindland to create a prototype, and then begin working with local manufacturers in the San Francisco area to create a real product. It was a rousing success. Not in a âreshaping fashion as the world knows itâ way, perhaps, but in a much more important âvalidating the business modelâ way.Â
Cordarounds; Image: Betabrand
Over the next several years, Lindland took that initial idea and ran with it. Start with a joke from Lindland or, increasingly, his growing audience of loyal customers and fellow ironic pranksters, like shiny pants made out of 100% âdisconium.â Run it through the wringer of community feedback. Prototype a product like Disco Pants. And then let the community put their money where their mouths are in a Kickstarter-like funding process that would only see the item produced if enough people placed preorders.
The result: Bike To Work pants that were comfortable, looked like regular chinos, but had enough reflective material to keep bikers safe; Black Sheep Sweaters made out of the wool of actual black sheep; and the aforementioned Disco Pants, which quickly became the go-to lower-body apparel of Burning Man attendees. In 2010, the company rebranded as Betabrand and was riding high on sales of over $1 million annually. Just three years later, everything would change.
Disco Pants; Image: Betabrand
What Drives Betabrand?
In 2012, Betabrand sold almost exclusively menswear â reversible smoking jackets/blazers, pinstripe âexecutiveâ hoodies, and the ever-popular Cordarounds. In 2013, Betabrand launched their first foray into womenâs wear with a product called âDress Pant Yoga Pantsâ with a campaign featuring models with PhDs. By 2020, finding a single article of menâs clothing on the site requires manually searching for the few overstock items still available. The womenâs line was such a hit that it completely overtook the business.
Dress Pant Yoga Pants; Image: Betabrand
Dress Pant Yoga Pants might have seemed, on the surface, like just another tongue-in-cheek product crowdsourced by a community that spun garments out of raw, ethically-sourced irony. Instead, it took over. But it wasnât blind luck â lightning striking the right place at the right time. Betabrand was actually set up from the beginning for success just like this.
Community engagement
A lot of brands make lofty claims about engaging with their communities. Many even try to live up to the hype, communicating regularly with the people that buy their products. Betabrand takes things to a different level. Where some companies might do a great job talking to their followers on social, or keeping up transparency with regular customer updates, Betabrand actually let its customers design products. And they did so from the very beginning.
This engagement and willingness to crowdsource ideas has shaped the company that Betabrand became, and the products it put out. The classic Dress Pant Yoga Pants were pocketless. Customers wanted pockets. Soon, the best-selling pants came with any number of pockets customers might want. Betabrand built the company not just on speaking to customers, but going out of their way to make customers an active participant in the design and production process.
In fact, the company doesnât simply collect and categorize feedback. Many of their designs are submitted by individual designers and then voted on by the community. Many are sold under a crowdfunding model where production doesnât go ahead unless a certain number of customers put in pre-orders via a Kickstarter-esque interface. And from start to finish, the company uses social channels and email to solicit comments from customers at a level most brands canât come close to matching. The result is a tight bond between customer, product, and brand that goes way beyond typical engagement.
Image: Betabrand
Adaptability
Itâs not uncommon for companies in San Francisco to pivot wildly, buffeted by the winds of changing trends and shifting buzzwords. Itâs a lot less common for a company to be so strongly plugged into its community that it remakes itself top to bottom based on what the community is clamoring for. But that was Betabrand. Their customers said they liked Dress Pant Yoga Pants better than Disco Pants, and so the company was crowdsourced into a pivot.
This willingness to change has driven Betabrand to outlast the hipster aesthetic that birthed it. Rather than holding on to a vision, founder Chris Lindland was willing to do what many founders arenât â let go of their brand and let the community take ownership. That ability to adapt beyond personal preferences is an often overlooked necessity for brands that hope to last longer than a moment in time. Some of the most iconic companies, from Banana Republic to Instagram, took a 180-degree turn to get to the lofty places they are now, and itâs hard to imagine them being anywhere near as successful without that pivot.
Whimsy business plans
Perhaps the strongest thread running through everything Betabrand has done, from off-axis corduroys to subverted office wear, is the refusal to take themselves seriously. Everything done has been done with a sense of self-aware humor.Â
Without that dedication to whimsy, it might have been much more difficult to give up so much creative control to customers. Without the ironic detachment, they might not have hit upon the idea of combining yoga pants and workwear. And then without a sense of humor, they might not have advertised them using women with PhDs and earned themselves the reputation of being an empowering brand for women. And without their freewheeling enthusiasm, they may not have had the courage to radically reinvent their brand to meet the new demand.
But that whimsy also disguises a much deeper secret to how the brand was built: hard data. Decisions were analyzed, customer profiles put together, future behavior modeled, and difficult decisions made, all supported by an incredible dedication to following the train of data the company had been collecting from customers. All of the engagement, the crowdsourcing, the crowdfunding model â all of it generated important data points that were studied from every angle to ensure the best outcome. Of course, that would be a much less interesting story than a whimsical brand making disco pants because their audience thinks itâs funny.
The Roll-Up
Looking at Betabrand now, itâs hard to imagine the company they started as a decade and a half ago. To a casual observer, Betabrand might look like a series of random decisions that somehow succeeded in spite of themselves and their founderâs dedication to doing the slightly weird thing. From their obsession with crowdsourcing to their limited supply model that intentionally cuts off access after a certain number of units sold, to the fun they have with their marketing (the company held a âWork From Home Fashion Showâ on April 15) â the decisions seem like a mashup of âSilicon Valley Greatest Hits.âÂ
Image: Twitter
But companies arenât built on luck, and the story of Betabrand is much more nuanced. Every decision is carefully tested, measured, sent to customers for feedback, and evaluated under a microscope. And itâs been that way since day one â thereâs a reason the company picked the name âBetabrandâ: that pioneering spirit of trying new things and figuring out what works is baked into their DNA. Which leads us to the lessons of Betabrand:
Customers know what they want better than any product planner possibly could. Betabrand seems like an outlier for letting their customers vote on and make suggestions on their products, but thereâs no reason it should be. Marketers and designers are taught to listen to their market â Betabrand teaches us that itâs much easier just to ask them.
Donât be afraid to try new things and experiment. If thereâs one consistency in the products Betabrand makes, itâs how willing they are to try new things and see what works. Brands too often get caught in a cycle where innovation is stifled by a need to match the âcorporate look.â Donât be afraid to break out and do something radically different â it might just be the thing that puts you on the map.
A good story goes a long way. Every decision Betabrand has made was based on a serious business need â Lindland didnât have enough money to produce his original Cordaround design, so he reached out to interested friends and family to crowdfund development; the company didnât have the capacity to mass-produce items, so they advertised limited releases, and a tragicomic accident at a mirror factory next door to Betabrandâs warehouse led to the creation of Disco Pants. That last one is made up, but it speaks to the importance of turning business realities into engaging stories. Consumers donât want to hear about how well a brand does its homework â they want to hear a fun story.